Mass sexual assault in downtown Cairo

On the first two days of Eid in Cairo, a mob of hundreds of men swept through downtown attacking and sexually assaulting random girls in an animalistic display that must boggle every mind. Apparently, the utter lack of basic decency, respect for women, or the rule of law was not confined to Ramadan alone – in fact, Ramadan appears to have been the only thing suppressing the baser instincts of these men. I feel sick at heart, and may never spend time downtown again, as it seems we women are actively in danger there. Will Cairo one day be like Mogadishu, where every woman is raped before she turns 16?

Who to blame? I’ll go with law enforcement. I was assigned an article once that said that a rape takes place every three minutes in North America alone; God knows what the number is worldwide. Many rapes are not reported. It is safe to say that is it futile to rail against dangerous male misconceptions of sex, and women, and consent – it doesn’t seem to have worked before. Most men – especially in deeply patriarchal societies like this one – don’t actually believe that no means no, or they don’t care. The only thing that can prevent sexual assault is fear of consequences, a fear that is entirely absent in Egypt. Socially, people don’t give a shit – it’s the woman’s fault, she led him on, look what she was wearing – and apparently frustrated hormones serve as a complete defense to any crime. But Egypt’s criminal code provides for numerous avenues of protection against assault, sexual harassment, and even unpleasant language. However, these felonies are rarely prosecuted and even more rarely reported to the authorities. A woman must have witnesses or physical evidence to even file a charge. Same old, I guess. It’ll be a few decades before they realize that credibility is usually the only evidence any decision maker has in any case, and that rape should be no different. Of course, in this case, witnesses and physical evidence were plentiful, but nothing will happen. I’m also of the opinion that if pre-marital sex were easily feasible, forget socially permitted, there would be less pent-up frustration, or at least men would know women, which I feel would go far towards promoting respect. But then, who creates the laws that curtail privacy rights? Who are the people that segregate Egyptian society and condemn women who have extra-marital sex? Men. Men who then turn around and place the blame for their policy choices on women. Why should we have to pay the price for social/legal codes not of our making? People who have religious reasons for abstention from pre-marital sex will abstain regardless of whether police will come knocking on their door, but the law should have no place in the bedrooms of the nation, and a hymen is not the same as a character reference.

The Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights has been organizing a campaign for some time against the persistent verbal and physical violence against women in Cairo. It is possible to contain it and deter it; it has virtually vanished from several Gulf countries as a result of increased police vigilance, fines, and the publicizing of the pictures of perpetrators. Something like that should be done here. Just because the men of Egypt are sexually frustrated, poor, and oppressed does not mean they can oppress others. Let’s do something – go volunteer, anything. I will. We women are Egyptians too and the streets are just as much ours as theirs.

Below is an eyewitness account I translated, in a somewhat rudimentary fashion, by Malek, a blogger who was there at the time. Find pictures at Wael Abbas.

Downtown’s Sexual Frenzy

Update:

Today I saw the same scene on the Nile Corniche (Abdel Minem Riad) that I saw yesterday. I could not take any photographs but Radwa assured me that she saw incidents of assault taking place in front of her before she found a taxi and sped home.

There was no police interference despite the presence of Central Security forces near the Arab League and near the American Embassy, not more than five minutes away on foot from the site of the events.

While yesterday the attacks were just random, young men now formed human trains that approached a girl quickly and surrounded her completely and began groping parts of her body. You can find pictures of what occurred at the end of the post.

We were sitting in a coffee shop downtown, I and Wael Abbas and Nasser Noury (a photographer for Reuters) and Mohammed El Sharkawy and others. A colleague joined us and told us that in front of Cinema Metro on Talaat Harb Street sexual assaults were taking place and that the cinema’s ticket window had been vandalized.

We made our way over there shortly, and in our minds we thought that what our colleague had told us was merely empty talk, with no basis in truth, especially as the streets surrounding Cinema Metro were very quiet as we walked toward there. We stopped at the cinema after we saw that the shattered ticket window, supposing that what the colleague had told us was just illusion or exaggeration at the most, but then after less than five minutes we found vast numbers of youth whistling and running towards Adly Street. We accompanied them to see what was going on.

We were surprised to find a girl in her early twenties who had fainted on the ground, surrounded by a large number of youth who were groping parts of her body and taking off her clothes.

I could not understand, or rather could not absorb, what was happening…the girl got up quickly and tried to run in any direction until she saw a Syrian restaurant called “el Madyafa” or something, and ran into it. The young men surrounded the restaurant and did not leave till one of them shouted, “There’s another girl in front of Miami!”

Everyone ran towards Talaat Harb Street again. I found there a girl encircled by hundreds of men who were trying to grope her and rip off her clothes. This time the girl was rescued by a taxi driver who picked her up in his taxi, but the men did not let the taxi pass and they formed a circle around it demanding that she get out of the car until a policeman interfered, raising his baton and beating anyone he saw in front of him.

The crowd did not disperse until the appearance of two girls wearing the Khaliji ebaya [loose outer garment worn by women from the Gulf] walking alone down the street. The young men surrounded them completely and a large number of them pressed against the girls and removed the veils they were wearing, and attempted to remove their ebayas, while 10 and 11 year old boys slipped inside the ebayas from beneath.

Onceagain shop owners interfered and sprayed the men with water, and tookthe girls inside their shops. After less than a second the actress OlaGhanem, who is starring in one of the movies opening on Eid (AbadetMawasem), appeared and the young men tried to get to her too, but shewas surrounded by personal body guards who tried to protect her butwere unable to block all the hungry hands that reached for Ola’sbreasts.

Aftera short while another girl appeared who was also wearing the veil andthe ebaya. She was also surrounded and they succeeded this time inremoving the ebaya, but a security guard was able to draw her into abuilding and shut the gate and prevented the young men from reachingthe girl.

Therewas another girl who wore trousers that were a little tight and anordinary shirt. This time her shirt was removed and her bra ripped andno one helped her except one of the security personnel who had a cluband who pulled her into a shop.

Thesewere the incidents I was able to personally witness in less than anhour that I spent in that area. I left after a conflict arose betweenus and the Security who refused to let us take photographs, and betweenyouth who wanted to steal Wael’s camera, and Wael Abbas, Peter Alfredand Nasser Noury.

Thephotographs that were taken were out of focus and did not depict theacts of abuse sufficiently, but it was in every case abuse. A verytight circle would be formed and the prey would be in the centre and noone could see what was happening very well.

Weheard that one girl had her clothes ripped completely off and that sheran naked until she entered one of the shops and another who gotcornered against a wall and surrounded and viciously violated.

Therewas no police presence and when I asked a lieutenant who was with theCentral Security forces he told me that there was Eid all overEgyptand that they could not dispatch any forces to downtown!!!

Iwas deeply astonished and told him that Eid celebrations were focusedon downtown and downtown’s theaters, so how could there not be anyforces??? He did not answer and left.

WhileWael was photographing the events one security officer pointed hisrevolver at Wael, threatening to kill him if he continued to takepictures. Wael reacted strongly and we were going to clash with theman, if he hadn’t fled into a building.

Icould not blame the young men. In my opinion, sexual repression anddepression and cowardice (I do not excuse the perpetrators for whatthey did, I just cannot understand the motives of over a thousandpeople who moved as one body towards a single target, I can’tunderstand) led them to not even distinguish between a veiled girl andan unveiled girl, or even a munaqaba girl [face veiled]. Repression anda severe sexual frenzy made them unable to make any distinctions. Oneof the chants that they repeated when they headed towards a prey was “Yay, we get to fuck! Yay, we get to fuck!” and another after they weredone with a girl and headed towards another, “Another one…another one!”

And the chants when they saw women in ebayat, “Beep beep beep…Saudi…beep beep beep Saudi”.

Idon’t know who to blame for what I saw. The hysterical girls in thestreet in front of me? Do I blame the sexually frenzied young men, halfof whom, or a little less, will find out when they have sex that theyare impotent or ejaculate prematurely or unable to sustain an erection? Should I blame the utter lack of police presence downtown, and allowingthis to be so for more than four hours?

Then young men did not distinguish when they undertook their assaults between veiled and unveiled girls.

They did not distinguish on the basis of age.

They were not all of one age, some were ten and under up to men in their forties.

Therewas an astounding state of chaos that persists until right now (we wentthere at 8, and now it is 12:30). There was no recognition of anyauthority or law or ethical values or even religion. There was chaos…but chaos wrongly directed and for the wrong aims.

Final notes:

We tried to direct girls away from the area by standing at the intersection ofAbdelkhalek Tharwat Streetand Taalat Harb to warn girls not to take Talaat Harb and explaining tothem what was going on, and they responded. We managed to do this withmore than one girl. Some girls stood next to us because some of us hadvideo cameras, to secure safety, and the youth were unable to attackthem because they realized some of us were journalists and they wereafraid to have their pictures published. Several men I photographedtried to threaten Peter andNasserwithconfiscating their cameras in protest at our photographing them. Mostof the pictures we took did not clearly show details because every girlwas in a tiny circle and we could not get to her.

We tried more than once to break up what was going on but our number did not exceed seven people, so we couldn’t do anything and every time a shop owner or taxi driveror building security guard would appear and help the girl enter intotheir premises.

Whathappened was a farce on every level. Until now I cannot understand themotives that can move more than a thousand young men in one movementtowards sexually harassing and sexually assaulting girls passingthrough the streets, girls of every kind, veiled, facially veiled, unveiled, Muslim, or non-Muslim.

Sexualrepression, cowardice, weakness, an attempt to oppress those who areweaker than you…I do not know the truth of what is written or analyzedregarding what happened.

I venture to suggest that Malek does not himself think that it makes a difference to the criminal nature of the events whether or not the victim is veiled…but that one would suppose that downtown men would distinguish. I also hope that I erred in interpreting that he actually does not blame the violent mob.

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What I got from him is that he was so overwhelmed with shock and disgust and incredulity that he couldn’t rationalize how that many people could do something this horrifying, effectively on a whim. Part of dealing with horrifying events is trying to understand how something like this could happen, and confusion, disbelief and a search for “an explanation” are typical reactions to that kind of shock.I know you’re angry but blaming all men isn’t the answer here.

i’m not angry…anymore. it doesn’t matter how many or how few of men i blame…it’s men. suffice it to say that a lot of men are fucked up and there doesn’t seem to be any way of actually cleaning them up short of criminal convictions.

I agree, I think he was trying to explain that the offenders used no rhyme or reason for attacking, simply that they were attacking all women they could.I lived in Cairo, but many of my colleagues travelled to Alex during Eid. Every one with stories of groping and verbal assault on the streets of Alex, despite being accompanied by men. Of course, the response then was “Your blonde, your foreign, this is Eid. The streets of Alex are like this during Eid. You should avoid going there this time of year.”And the mob shouting “Yay! We get to fuck!”?? What the fuck…how many of those boys and men actually have sex, and have been deprived of it soley because of Ramadan? The mob mentality is dangerous. I’ve witnessed it in Egypt in other conditions.What you say about the Gulf is correct. I think the public shaming of putting names and photos in the paper is highly effective, particularly in a smaller society in which every last name carries meaning. I was always more comfortable in the Gulf when it came to men, and when I was uncomfortable, it was usually involving sex-crazed men from other non-Gulf countries. I don’t think these kinds of men in Egypt will fear the consequences until the police start hauling them in and employing every human right’s violation they can think of.

I’m sorry you feel this down, sooth. But don’t let something this abominable get you down to the point where you mistrust everyone and everything. The level of evil in the world hasn’t gone up with this heinous act, there’s always been good and bad and it shifts around.Cairogal is spot on about the mob mentality and the shaming of sex offenders (and drunk drivers) by publishing their names in the papers. The fact is, Egypt is so regressive, I doubt we even have the mechanisms in place to round up those pigs, prosecute them and let the media flay them alive, in this manner.I’m not there and I chose a while back not to be a part of Egypt, so I can only express my outrage. As far as an active solution, all I can do is forward this story to the Washington Post, The NY Times and CNN. As usual, the only way the Egyptian government does anything is when the US shames it into acting. Oh, and threatens to cut foreign aid, as well.

My God its simply grotesque . im sick sick to my very core . nowhere is safe for women . you can even get assaulted in your very home just like my poor sisterI wish there were some sort of society you could join to help prevent this sort of thing

Well hebe, there is.35 US states have “shall issue” type concealed carry permits. This is where the sheriff “shall issue” a permit unless certain disqualifying conditions are met. The end result is, there is no way in hell that this sort of crap could happen in places like Idaho, where I live. Guns would be drawn, and the bad guys would be outnumbered, and several of them would be dead. In concealed carry states, deadly force in defence of others is usually explicit in the law, although it certainly is implied in the constitution. But as the central park “wilding” incident shows, in liberal, gun controlled areas, that right (I would say responsibility) is repressed.

Forsooth – I got here from Sandmonkey’s blog. Thanks for putting this post up and for translating Malek’s post. What a horrific incident!! I’m still waiting to hear about it on the mass media – but perhaps, like the police, the MSM is simply going to pretend it didn’t happen. Does anyone know how many women were attacked in these incidents?Oh, and one thing: when I click on the link you have for Wael Abbas, I get his blog, but no pictures of these incidents. And I can’t read Arabic well enough to know where I’m supposed to go to look for them. Help?

A few years ago a colleague of mine was painting on her 1st floor balcony (2nd for us in the US) in Maadi when a young man walked by. She noticed him, but carried on painting. Moments later, the doorbell rang and when she opened it, a Scottish lass of almost 6 full feet, this much shorter young man immediately tried to force his way in, groping her breasts in the process. As she slammed his arm in the door, he continued to grope at her. Within moments of forcing him out, she informed 2 of our male colleagues got wind of the story and started off down the road after this guy. And as anyone in Egypt knows, there are no secrets. They relayed the story to some doormen along the way who joined in the posse (sans guns a’ blazin’). The posse grew, and they found the guy, promptly beat him to a pulp, and then called the police. Even the Egyptians are capable of cowboy-style justice.

ex-centrist, to conclude that this is the doing of Islam, I find short-sighted and quite frankly DUMB. I hope you’re not working in a field that requires any form of research.. Sheeesh.. as Forsoothsayer’s dad would say:”huwwa il-mokhh bi’yishtirooh min feen”:::insert eye roll:::

Greetings from California!I saw your blog through a link from dhimmiwatch.org, specifically:http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/013810.php#commentsLove your blog. Disgusted by the violence you reported. From what is posted at dhimmiwatch, apparently gang rapes are not uncommon in many places where young muslim males are. Was shocked to learn about the rape epidemic in scandinavia perpetrated by immigrant “youths.”Rape committed by one person on another is bad enough but gang rape just boggles the mind. The reasoning (or really lack thereof) in islamic law concerning rape is jaw-dropping. Rape is difficult enough to prove as it is, but this whole concept of having to produce 4 male witnesses who weren’t part of the attack. WTF! Been learning more about islam over the last year and am still having some tough sledding over how primitive and misogynistic it is and will always remain. No bida!Sorry for the reason of coming to visit your blog but it is quite interesting! Good job!

Robert,Although I’am disgusted by the way conservative islamics tend to treat women I can’t help but notice what a a sad little tosser you are. You are no better than any islamic fundamentalist. I can’t think of how to begin to describe how much I loath you. So I won’t.

I don’t know who to blame for what I saw. The hysterical girls in the street in front of me? Do I blame the sexually frenzied young men, half of whom, or a little less, will find out when they have sex that they are impotent or ejaculate prematurely or unable to sustain an erection? Should I blame the utter lack of police presence downtown and allowing this to be so for more than four hours? Now that is a very simple question to answer. The perpetrators are to blame for their (own) actions, the police (ie the government) for not intervening. Everybody should always be considered accountable for their actions, unless proven otherwise. Anyway, very good report of a very frightening sighting. Thanks for that and I take my hat of for you because you actually acted and tried to do something to intervene.

I had read that in spite of Egypt being one of the biggest cities in the world, it was one of the safest. I always felt safe in Cairo if not because of this prior knowledge, then coz I always expected a certain level of decency of Egyptians. The concepts of “gad3ana” & “rogoula” were things I relied on. So if there is some pimp (**arabic**) harassing u, it would be justified to expect that some other man out there might try to help. Obviously this is not the case anymore. All frustrations political & social are being channelled towards women. Why should anyone care!! All the big men’s female “acquaintances” are protected by bullet-proof cars & bodyguards. Sadat only modified the family law when his daughter was divorced. People never stop to think about the consequences of their action & of course the police couldn’t care less about their lack of it. They are being paid to protect a regime not the nation. So maybe it’s about time we give these people something to think about & the only way to do that is to have the those sterile laws implemented. But then again the problem isn’t will the law it’s with the law enforcers. If men stop thinking about their dicks, they might start thinking about everything wrong around them … & that is an even more “serious” threat.

You said, “They didn’t even distiguish between veiled and unveiled women.” So let me see, your saying it’s understandable if they rape unveiled girls? You said it twice, so obviously you are making a distinction in your own mind. One rape is more horrifying than the other? What a creepy society

THIS IS NOT ABOUT ISLAM. the problem with writing a criticism about anything regarding the middle east is a person gets a lot of ignorant people from dhimmiwatch and sandmonkey fans who are incapable of critical thought and just search frantically for confirmation of the pearls of wisdom that drop from the mouth of that imbecile, george bush.now, i don’t actually think that egypt has sharia law in place regarding the rules of evidence (i’ll check on that in a few minutes though). few islamic countries do, just like israel has not codified the startlingly misogynistic laws of the Torah. this is because they do not accord with modern thought. as for western countries, it is only lately, very lately, that they have lifted their own outstandingly sexist laws regarding the prosecution of sexual assault. egypt isn’t a developing country for nothing. i’d like to also point out that when i was studying sexual assault in canada, perpetrators of the worst offences were often white. but what do you care? apparently arabs and muslims have now replaced blacks as dangers to women. these things happen everywhere…the only difference is that in other places where the rule of law means anything these things are prosecuted. but i’m sure the effects of poverty, a stagnant political and legal system, a patriarchal culture don’t matter to the likes of you enlightened commenters and watchers of Fox news, am i right? elle was right. read her comment with a modicum of attention.i’d also like to stress, for the numerous illiterates who commented, that i simply translated malek’s account. that whole bit about veiled versus unveiled women was not authored by me. that said, if you would (say) read, you would note that i think he meant that he was astonished that the masses, known for making this odious distinction, did not do so, not that he himself held that view. i’ve met the guy, and he’s not like that, even if so many arab guys (and western guys) think that clothing is a defence for sexual assault. i could go on at length about the widespread nature of myths surrounding consent, but this doesn’t seem like an educated crowd so i won’t bother. Go on hating a religion you know nothing about and places you’ve never been to. searching for reasons only wastes time better spent in bombing innocent arab civilians.

> i’ll have no defence of gun > violence on this blog. guns are > for killing people.Guns are tools with no moral relavance, like other inanimate objects. What the tool produces is a result of the character in the user.Then rape is preferred to stopping the attack? I gather you believe your dignity and life are not worth fighting for.Completely contrary to what we teach our daughter.Ric

Thank you for reporting this. The only thing to stop such events is, as you write, the fear of inevitable punishment.”these things happen everywhere.”As a matter of fact, in Europe 85% of rape reported is committed by Muslim immigrants, as police reports show.Difficult not to connect it to Islam.

Oh Man! Besides my shock at the event itself, as I don’t live in Egypt now and I only found out about it today.. I’m also upset at the people who commented here. Talk about mass rape, talk about crime, talk about a social problem, and all they catch is the words “Egypt” and “Islam” and they turn it into another evidence on the wickedness of Islam blah blah blah. It’s one of the specific reason I never started a public blog that discusses life in Egypt or anything like that.To Sooth, thanks for translating the blog entry.. I’ll tell everyone I know about it. People are sitting there in Cairo and don’t have a clue it even happened!

i work for the AUC university newspaper and i was wondering if the eye witnesses that were there during this horrific incident could give me any quotes or comments about how everything was, and what happened in the incident

Well a few years ago we had an incident like this here in New York after the Puerto Rican day parade where roves of men attacked women in Central park. Words could not describe that then and I’m at a loss for words reading this now. There is no excuse for this. No man can honestly justify attacking women at will in the street like that. Any man that can is not a man at all.

Akiva,bad guys don’t usually bother with getting permits. Background checks, rudimentary training and fingerprinting is required.But if it comes down to good guys vs. bad guys, let’s hope the good guys have guns too. This sort of thing would never happen in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming for example, because good guys outnumber the bad guys, and the good guys have not been neutered by feminists, the way Europe and much of metropolitan America.

Because of this behaviour of these animals we have to restrict our visit to Egypt from Canada. My husband has adamantly refused to allow anybody from our family to go to Egypt without having a gun!! Its because of this animals people cannot live life. And do not blame only Mobarak. Egyptians themselves need to take responsibility … need to speak up. These are their mothers and sisters who are being not only physically, but more importantly, psychologically killed. How can those girls live a life after being rapped! I am outraged at the barbaric nature of these so-called muslims! Muslims … oh ya, really good Muslims. They go pray in the Mosque and then disgrace themselves and their female society and then go to the Mosque and pray. It is these Muslims who are making lives of other Muslims around the world disastrous. How can I defend my Muslim brother and sisters in Canada, while this terrorism is going on in our own land by our own people! To be honest, anywhere you go, Muslims are the ones that cheat you, and they are the ones who do all the bad stuff. And then we say … no they don’t, it is only a few Muslims. Ya right. Majority of Muslims born in the Islamic countries have terrorist tendencies. Either they are bombing or raping their own countries. Muslims have to take responsibility that they are helping create such circumstances. Right now they rape girls … but be sure, in a few years, your boys will not be safe either!!Many people here will say this person is crazy talking like this, but inside you know I am right. Salaam

Those long all concealing robes muslim women wear would make a great hiding place for an AK-47, or some other street sweeper.They would be protecting themselves and removing scum from the earth at the same time.

for god’s sake, its not about religion/race/creed – its about pathetic men and their need for power and dominance. it happens everywhere and all these statistics and pumped-out-of-assery comments on this post make me want to puke up my delicious dinner.you lot are worse than the ass + breast grabbing apes that terrorized those women, atleast they’re too ignorant to use the internet. whats your excuse?!

“Somewhere in America, a woman is raped every 2 minutes, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.”And over 50% of those rapes are perpetrated by husbands, boyfriends, or acquaintances.Only 37% of all rapes in the U.S. are reported.Amazing how influential Islam is in the United States, hinduzion. After all, “maybe its not just men, maybe its the fucked up religion of islam.”

Thought I posted this before, but here goes:elle said “If men stop thinking about their dicks, they might start thinking about everything wrong around them … & that is an even more “serious” threat.”Spot on, elle. It’s much easier to control women, what they wear, how they act, and whether or not they drive, rather than control a corrupt government or socially biased society. If we looked back over the years, I think we would see a correlation between political and social injustice and the limitation of women’s rights.

ek, hey, you don’t know a lot about here if you think this will make the mainstream news. i personally know the people who witnessed this incident. it’s not hard to believe at all, knowing cairo. it’s nice to see how you ignore statistics about sexual assaults. i know a lot about it, and it’s equally common everywhere. i will close comments now…i’m not here tp encourage hte. i’ll leave that to the rednecks.